Monday, September 29, 2008

I spent the three-day weekend shooting the Austin City Limits Music Festival. It was great. This morning, Pitchfork Media published my photos. Then, a couple hours later, I get an interesting email. Here it is in its entirety:

message: I'll have my lawyers contacting you soon. I suggest you seek some legal advice in regards to your brand name.

However, the one relevant to this email is currently the most famous of us all, Dave Hill. Dave does really awesome work with bands, WWE superstars, the guy from Napoleon Dynamite, products, and all kinds of other stuff. His look is famous in photo circles for being the first to mix stylistic elements the way he does, and a google search will reveal countless forum posts written by people trying to get his look. I've always hoped that one day all the David Hills would get together, and I'd get to meet him.

So naturally, I found this email slightly disturbing. From a legal perspective, it's practically impossible to trademark a combination of a common name and a common word. "David Hill Photography" is about as likely to get trademark status as "John Smith Food." Wanting to know if this was for real, I immediately called David's agency, Fox Creative. They said they would look into it and call me back. Meanwhile, I found Dave's cell phone and left him a voice mail assuring him that I would be willing to disambiguate our brands on the friendliest of term. I waited a few hours and called Fox again. I spoke with Paige, who said she represents Dave, and she assured me that she had contacted Dave, and that Dave said the email I had received was a phony. That was a relief. UPDATE: Today, Sept. 30, Dave himself emailed me to reply,

"No one can copyright their own name! Especially one as common as ours! haha ... Keep rockin' in Austin!"

Friday, September 19, 2008

America loses two run-down New York City treasures this week--Yankee Stadium and Coney Island's Astroland. My most recent pics of Yankee Stadium are on film, so you're not going to see those today. But I did recently travel to Coney Island. Above is the 1918 Wonder Wheel. Yes, we rode it.

GTA IV players will recognize 100 percent of these locations...

Since this is a nostalgia blog entry, I'm using cheesy vignetting effect here, and generally screwing around with the colors. I would not do this to you unless you asked.

Fortunately, the Cyclone sits outside the main Astroland area, and it's supposed to survive. The Wonder Wheel park is also separate and is continuing for the time being. Coney Island is in the center of a really ugly battle to gentrify the area and force out all the low-rent entertainment for which it's been known since World War II. Coney Island's heydey was around 1917. I highly recommend the Wikipedia entry.